Your intuition is telling you that you should shoot for 50% so that you can divide the search space in half regardless of the outcome. A right or wrong answer w

Your intuition is telling you that you should shoot for 50% so that you can divide the search space in half regardless of the outcome. A right or wrong answer will eliminate half of the possible remaining words. But right and wrong guesses are not equally valuable in hangman. A wrong guess will eliminate all words of a given length containing the given letter. But a correct guess gives you more: you get the location (or locations) of the letter in the word as a bonus. This will reduce your remaining search space drastically. Thus, you should optimize for the success of your next guess.